Massacres and Genocide are a topic of discussion, too often personalized, too often being parsed and debated. They are a horror. It’s always a group, a conspiracy, a government, that makes a massacre, but the people who profit from massacres prefer for us to think that it’s an individual responsible. Which might, in a psychological perspective, tend to hide the extent of the deaths.
This essay is in part prompted by belatedly reading a Kissinger death reaction article from Black Agenda Report, and the rest the dK environment of continued talking past each other in I/P diaries and threads. The BAR article notes how Kissinger was & is used opportunistically. The mainstream media - and even some Left sites - try to make him singularly more powerful/responsible for USA bad actions when what he was doing followed what was done before.
Kissinger, before he died, used the present to defend his past: From a Jacobin article:
the ways in which Barack Obama’s pragmatic, managerial militarism echoed Kissinger’s earlier justifications for interventionism and war, and the way Kissinger used Obama’s disregard of national sovereignty, in his reliance on drones and bombing campaigns, as an ex post facto absolution of his own past actions.
“Gaza with Snow”
Consider North Korea, which BAR called “Gaza with Snow”. I’ve known that the war — which was pre-Kissinger — was filled with atrocities, and that the war is not technically ended, as no peace treaty was ever signed. The BAR article makes a visceral description of the attacks on civilians:
In the case of Korea, one fifth of the population were killed, according to General Curtis LeMay, who designed and conducted the bombing campaign. What had been done tactically to individual cities—Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima--was concretized as continuous strategy for Korea: 635,000 tons of bombs, more than the entire Pacific bombing campaign, dropped in endless sorties of high explosives, cluster bombs, and napalm over an entire country.
To get a contemporary image of this, take the worst bombing of Northern Gaza — already unimaginable and unthinkable in its sheer, atrocious barbarity — imagine, for example, the devastation of the Jabaliya refugee camp — and then double the intensity of that bombing, and then magnify the theater of bombing 800 fold. Add in endless napalm and time-delayed cluster bombs — to kill anyone who tried to rescue survivors--then you have a small sense of what Korea went through. Then add snow ... If you were bombed and somehow survived the shredding of your flesh by cluster bomb shrapnel, or its incineration by napalm, there's a good chance you would die from exposure to cold under an open sky, as the US rolled out massive air strikes in the month of November, 73 years ago. And still, if you survived all this, and had dug yourself into subterranean shelter, you could have been drowned later when irrigation and hydroelectric dams were attacked, and entire valleys inundated with flooding, while subjected to threats of biological and chemical weapons.
South Korea
Early in that war, there were also massacres in South Korea. BAR continues:
At the time of the massacres, the total number of Bodo League registrants was 300,000. In addition, orders were also given to kill everyone who was a member of the South Korean Worker's Party, another 360,000 people. When the killings commenced, children, wives, and families were also rounded up and killed, so estimates of hundreds of thousands slaughtered are highly plausible.
It’s hard to fathom such an extreme, extensive, and rapid massacre, but one indicator of the scale of the slaughter was that the Japanese filed an official complaint against the South Korean government, complaining about the murdered corpses washing up and littering its beaches, five hundred miles away across the ocean.
At the current moment, there are over 150 identified mass graves, each estimated to have 100’s-1000's of unexcavated dead. A single mass grave identified in Daejon is over 10 football fields long.
The article then compares Korea with Kissinger’s reputation:
Henry Kissinger's atrocities, barbarous as they were, all fall solidly within the behavioral norm for US policy in light of the above history. Chest-beating liberal types love to scapegoat Kissinger, the better to pretend that he was some criminal outlier to US norms and ideals, the better to dissociate themselves and the US from this horrific past.
Forgetting History
Another inconvenient USA militarism factoid is Afghanistan. Pundits can only call Afghanistan “our” Longest War by disappearing USA’s wars of expansion to the Pacific. USA is still “stealing from Indians” … but on a lower scale because the are lower population percentage than Palestinians in I/P.
Speaking broadly, this is a socialist summary from another article:
After World War II, the U.S. helped bring mass death to countries too numerous to list here. For example, Greece (about 165,000), Korea (about 5 million), Cambodia/Laos/Vietnam (about 8 million), Indonesia (over 1 million), El Salvador/Guatemala/Honduras/Nicaragua (100s of thousands), Iraq (1 to 2 million), Iran (over half a million) Afghanistan (100s of thousands), Libya (100s of thousands), Syria (100s of thousands), Palestine (10s of thousands), Rwanda (1 to 2 million), Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) (over 6 million), Somalia (100s of thousands), Yemen (100s of thousands), Ukraine (about 14,000 before February 24, 2022 and 100s of thousands since).
Ever since the end of WW II (including unnecessary massacres at the end when the outcome was already certain) USA has been acting as if they should be Boss of the World. “We” have 750+ major foreign military bases as an outgrowth of that. Yet, by casualty figures, it was the Russians that beat the Germans, not the USA & western Europe soldiers. A necessary reminder is, just as there is just as there is much protest against USA support for Israel military’s current attacks “against Hamas,” there was also much peace action going on before and during World War II that pro-war popular culture (especially in USA) ignores or belittles as “isolationism”.
Capitalism demands massacres
Extreme wealth disparity can only be maintained through repressive force, the harsher the conditions, the more deaths are needed to maintain control.
There is the ongoing cumulative mass death in Congo because cobalt and other essential resources. There will be more (in South America?) in capitalistic search of lithium. We need The Green New Deal. Even broader, we need The Red Deal.
Another Jacobin article described how Kissinger defended capitalism:
ensuring the health of the system as a whole wasn’t always the same as ensuring the dominance of American businesses. Rather, the American state needed to administrate a world order amenable to the development and flourishing of an international capitalist class. The United States became the lead architect of postwar Atlantic capitalism — a commercial regime that tied Western European and Japanese economic interests to American corporate strategies. In other words, to preserve a global capitalist order that foremost defended American business — not businesses — the United States needed to foster the successful capitalist development of its rivals.
Much of this “defense” of capitalism — before, during, and after Kissinger — involves massacres. :-(
Danger of Normalization
Contrary to our bloody present and blood past, we are taught through the media that Kissinger (and Hitler) are uniquely horrible. At the same time, the corporate media is attempting to teach us to accept mass death. We are discouraged or prevented from grieving or objecting. It’s a frequent theme in many Movement Memo podcasts. This is a beautiful defense of solidarity from the most recent episode:
we were cautioning people to be aware of what was being normalized, and of what they were learning to tolerate or treat as inevitable or as background noise. We were warning people that they had to consciously rage against the further normalization of mass death and human disposability. Because once our moral clarity is gone, and we have become emotionally immune to atrocity, we are lost, and we won’t even know what to fight for — which would render all of the left’s many disagreements about tactics and strategies irrelevant.
Or, as Aaron Bushnell warned, “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” A similar observation at ~5:40 here:
What they’re doing in Gaza is what they want to do to the rest of us.
For the powerful will kill when it is in their interest. As Marx said, “capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” I don’t have all the labor history details in my head, but I know that when the peasants revolted after the Black Death and so on, many were killed, and the leaders killed in horrible ways. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the bosses reacted to Unionizing with guns and killing. They didn’t stop because they “changed their minds.” They stopped because killing didn’t work, it increased the fighting. They used other methods.
If they can’t get enough armed guards they trust — the “special bodies of armed men” Lenin mentioned — they try to use laws and policies … but enforcement still seems to need employees. Military recruitment is down. There are so-called “shortages” of police and prison guards (though spending the government funds on social spending and reducing police forces and incarceration would lead to more safety). Solidarity is always a thing. Counter-recruitment should probably also be a thing.